


Not a Kindness

by rhysiana



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: (very brief mention), Angst with a Happy Ending, Dead Allison Argent, Dreams and Nightmares, M/M, References to Peter's Coma, Woke Up Married
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-24
Updated: 2019-09-24
Packaged: 2020-10-27 16:18:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20763299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhysiana/pseuds/rhysiana
Summary: Peter wakes up married to Chris. Too bad he immediately knows it isn't real.





	Not a Kindness

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to another edition of "This is not the thing I meant to be writing!" I figured if the idea wouldn't leave me alone after three days, it had to get written just to get it out of my head. So here, have some angst!

Peter wakes up knowing something is wrong. He doesn’t open his eyes. He doesn’t move. He keeps his breathing even and documents every detail he can glean from his surroundings.

He’s in a bed. There is a warm body next to him. He has his arm slung over the other person very familiarly. Their breathing and heartbeat are still even with sleep. His nose is buried against the back of the other person’s neck, and they smell warm and familiar, like home, like _him_.

He knows what he’ll see before he even opens his eyes. Salt-and-pepper hair, increasingly salt, leading to a heavily scruffed jaw, tan skin down to where the collar of his shirt usually sits, shoulders still broad, functionally and lithely muscled, a little scarred, a tattoo high on one bicep: Chris Argent. Here in his bed. Sleeping peacefully like he belongs there, despite how (rightly) paranoid Peter knows him to be.

He lets his gaze flit around the room as much as he can without moving, and is slightly surprised to find it doesn’t appear to be any of the bedrooms he knows: not his room at the old Hale house, not his college apartment, not his current modern condo, so whatever this is, it’s new. The bedframe is minimalist but in dark wood; the lamps have a more traditional line to them than Peter would have picked; the bed linens are gray, which Peter has no actual objection to, but he doesn’t think he’d have gone for a plaid pattern for the duvet cover, though he doesn’t hate it; the window is open just enough he can smell the outdoors very clearly, a habit he’d only become compulsive about after the hospital. Combined with Chris’s hair, all the signs seem to point to this not being a wistful vision of a past that might have been, which, Peter supposes, is a nice change.

Chris’s heartbeat picks up as he starts to wake, and Peter starts to remove his arm, but Chris grabs his wrist in a warm and automatic grip and mumbles, “Just wait for the alarm,” like they wake up like this every day. Peter stares down at where Chris’s fingers wrap around his wrist and sees a glint of gold on his ring finger. Looks at his own hand and sees a matching ring there.

Sometimes Peter really, really hates his brain. He doesn’t want to go through this again. He’s not sure he can survive it.

Of course, that’s what he thought all the other times, too.

* * *

Shockingly, he does manage to stay in bed until the alarm goes off, falling back to sleep briefly and then miraculously waking up still in the same unrecognizable house (that is also somehow definitely his, _theirs_), rather than back in the fire or some other repeated nightmare as he’d been expecting. Chris rolls over with a sleepy smile that Peter hasn’t seen in twenty years and kisses him briefly before throwing back the covers and muttering, “Coffee.”

Peter watches him go, admiring the lines of his body, the way he moves when he’s relaxed and unhurried and not quite awake, not to mention only half-dressed, and wonders how long he can stay here if he just doesn’t move. On the other hand, sometimes that makes the vision break up that much faster, if he allows it to become static, so he decides soaking in as much as he can while he’s here is the better plan. He pushes the covers away and stands to follow Chris, presumably to the kitchen, vaguely registering relief that this isn’t one of the dreams where he’s permanently damaged from the fire.

The house is comfortable, lived in, everything already melded together, no evidence of two separate lives recently crammed together into one house. There are photographs on the walls of the hallway, mostly travel scenes, places he always wanted to visit, or remembers visiting but alone, and then a collection of candids of the two of them in a collage frame. They look happy, in love. The pictures appear to span continuous years together, not just months. Peter wonders what their backstory is this time.

The kitchen is full of sunlight, pouring through a window over the sink that looks out into the Preserve, a thing Peter knows without knowing how. Chris’s smile is very white as he hands Peter his mug of coffee. The laugh lines by his eyes crinkle up. It’s more than Peter can bear.

“Hey,” Chris says, hand coming up to cup Peter’s cheek. “You doing okay? You seem a little off this morning.”

Peter nods, afraid to speak. Sometimes that’s enough to break the spell, and he’s not ready to leave yet.

Chris continues to look concerned, smooths Peter’s hair back from his forehead, leans in to kiss him there. “I love you,” he says, warm and easy, like it’s a habitual statement of fact.

“I know,” Peter says, and closes his eyes against what will come next. “That's how I know this isn’t real.”

He lets the coffee mug fall and shatter on the tile floor. Hot coffee splashes against his pajama pants, scalds the tops of his feet, the edges of his toes.

* * *

He wakes up this time with a gasp, already sitting up. The pulse oximeter falls off his finger as he surges forward; an IV line tugs at the bend of his elbow before he yanks it out on his way over the foot of the bed to push the stranger in the room up against the wall, feet dangling a few inches off the floor. The man stinks of magic.

“What did you do?” Peter growls around his fangs, eyes blazing. His claws aren’t out yet, but that can change.

“Nothing!” the man squeaks, and Peter presses him more firmly into the wall. “Nothing bad,” the man amends, hands up in a futile gesture of innocence.

“Peter,” Derek says quietly, one hand hovering uncertainly near Peter’s arm, like he’s not sure it’s safe to touch him.

Peter lowers the man just enough that his feet can touch the floor again, but doesn’t let go. “How long was I out?” he asks Derek without taking his eyes off his captive. This is too personal a question to risk real eye contact on.

“A day! Only a day!” the man rushes to assure him before Derek can respond.

Peter cuts a look at Derek, who nods in confirmation. Peter relaxes his hold slightly. “What did you do?” he repeats.

The man swallows nervously. “You got caught in the edges of a stasis spell. It wasn’t meant for humans, you see, or not-humans either, um, people in general, so I wasn’t sure how it would affect you or how long it would take me to reverse it, that’s why you’re in the hospital, I’m so sorry, please don’t kill me.”

Peter remembers heading into the Preserve to check out whatever had tripped the wards around the Nemeton. Remembers seeing a stranger—this stranger—standing at the edge of the clearing, fiddling with an arrangement of rocks and consulting a notebook, shouting “No!” just as Peter had stepped out of the woods. Remembers Chris stepping out of the trees on the man’s other side, too. And then a flash of light.

“But it shouldn’t have been that bad,” the man continues blithely, “because once I realized, I added a charm so you’d have lovely dreams of your heart’s desire. Since I didn’t know how long you’d be trapped, I thought I should at least do you that kindness.”

Peter shoves away from the man, and not gently. “What you did,” he snarls, “was _not_ a kindness.”

He yanks the plastic bag containing his clothes out of the drawer where he could smell they’d stashed them and leaves before anyone else can try to talk to him. Pauses just long enough in the stairwell to change, leaves the hospital gown behind, and then _gets the hell away from there_.

* * *

He assumes his car is still out by the Preserve and walks home. He’ll deal with it in the morning. He’ll deal with everything in the morning. Right now, he feels raw, flayed open, his heart’s desire and his recurring nightmare both brought back with a vivid clarity he really didn’t need.

He takes the elevator up to his floor, trying not to think about anything at all, leaning into the blandness of its cold, brushed metal interior. He makes himself tea instead of coffee when he gets in, then wanders the apartment, touching all the things he’d bought for himself, furnishings he’d selected with exactly no one’s tastes in mind but his own, trying to anchor himself back in reality.

He’s sitting on the couch, tea stone cold on the coffee table in front of him, when someone knocks on the door a few hours later.

“Chris,” he says as he opens the door, a toneless acknowledgement before he turns away. He still feels nothing, nothing, but he’s not sure how long that will last if he actually looks at Chris right now. He keeps remembering the golden light of their kitchen, how much warmer the furnishings of that nonexistent house seemed, how much he thinks he actually liked them better than what he really owns.

“Are you all right?” Chris asks, and the tone of concern is so familiar that Peter shudders.

“I’m fine. Werewolf, remember?”

“I don’t mean physically, and you damn well know it. Derek and Melissa said you blew out of there as fast as possible. I can’t imagine waking up in the hospital again was… easy for you.”

“No,” Peter allows, because if he admits this, hopefully no one (Chris) will ask about the other part.

Fate, of course, really has it in for him, though, because the next thing out of Chris’s mouth is, “What did you dream about?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Peter says, sharper than he means to.

Chris swallows, and Peter notices, because of course Peter is looking at him now, he can’t _not_ look at him, even when he tries. “I didn’t want to wake up,” Chris says, like it costs him to admit it.

Peter clenches his hands, letting his claws pierce his palms to remind himself this is real, he’s already awake. “I wanted nothing more.”

Chris looks at him, surprised, and Peter lets out a bitter laugh he can’t hold in anymore.

“Do you know how many times I had that dream before? Variations of it, over and over again, for _six goddamn years_. I hate it now. I can’t stand it.”

“But the spell…”

“Oh, it was my heart’s desire all right. But do you know what it does to you, to get your heart’s desire, again and again, only to realize it isn’t real, it’s just a dream, it could end at any time, and the next time you close your eyes, or open a door, or walk into the next room, you might end up in a nightmare instead? I’m actually glad at this point that it’s nothing I’ll ever get in reality, because I’d spend every single second of the day believing I was back in my coma.” His hands are shaking by the end of that speech, and he genuinely can’t tell if it’s from rage or residual horror or both.

Chris looks horrified enough for both of them, and steps forward to fold Peter into a hug he hasn’t felt since he was eighteen. Not awake, anyway. He pushes Chris away roughly, fighting to breathe.

“You _can’t_. Didn’t you just hear me?”

“Peter,” Chris asks, soft, pleading, “what did you dream about?”

“You,” Peter whispers, looking away again. “It’s always you. I’m married to you, and we’re happy. The other details change, but never that part.” He hates himself for still wanting it. “Why do you think I’ve been avoiding you all this time?”

Chris steps close again, hands twitching toward Peter like he wants to touch him again but doesn’t dare. “And what do you think I dreamed about?”

Peter looks up with a frown. “Allison, I assumed.” Because if there is one thing he knows about this new, older Chris Argent, it’s that he loved his daughter.

Chris nods. “Allison, yes, but also you. With me. With _us_.”

Peter shakes his head sharply. “Stop.”

“Why?” Chris asks, and then reaches forward to cup Peter’s cheek just the way he had in the dream. “Why should I? I can never get Allison back, and this nightmare of a life has taken everything and everyone else from me as well, but it also gave you _back_ to me. Why shouldn’t we finally live the life we want? There is literally nothing stopping us now.”

Chris is standing so very close now. Peter can feel the warmth radiating from his hand. He wants to lean into it; he wants to lean forward and kiss Chris with all the passion of six years of dreams and nightmares; he wants Chris to never touch him again so he’ll never be forced to doubt his sanity like this again. He feels the edges of reality start to blur and glances down at his left hand instinctively. He relaxes minutely when there’s no ring.

“I _can’t_,” he says, anguished but emphatic. “Leave, now, please, while I still know what’s real.”

Chris’s thumb brushes along his cheekbone and Peter realizes it’s wet. “I will,” Chris says, “if that’s what you need. I’ll leave. But I’m real, this is real, and I will come back. I’ll come back every day and tell you it’s real until you believe me.”

Peter’s right hand flies to his left, trying to twist the ring that isn’t there in a nervous habit he never actually had, and this time Chris notices. He pries Peter’s left hand free and kisses the knuckle of his ring finger, looking Peter straight in the eye.

“This is real. I woke up married to you in that dream, and I was so happy I never wanted to leave. I saw that ring on my finger and loved everything it represented in a way I never associated with a wedding ring before. I woke up thinking I would give anything to feel that way again. But if you never want to see a ring on your finger or mine so you know what’s real, we don’t have to get rings. Hell, we don’t ever have to get married. I will do whatever it takes to convince you. I don't need to wake up married to you, I just need to wake up with you. Every day. If we still both want the same thing after all this time, don’t you think we should try?”

And all at once, Peter makes up his mind. “Yes,” he says, and gets a hand around the back of Chris’s neck to yank him into the kind of kiss he’s been dreaming about for years, “I do.”

After all, he thinks, Chris Argent has always been the kind of man he’d risk his sanity for.


End file.
